Human movement simulation tools are used for ergonomic analysis of workplaces, products, training and service operations, as well as in the entertainment industry. The process of accurately representing human movement is tedious, time-consuming, and requires skilled operators adept at manipulating complex 3D kinematic systems at the joint level and an eye for postural realism. Prior efforts at predicting human postures has not provided the desired simultaneous characteristics of being computationally rapid, physiologically realistic, and generalizable to novel conditions. These characteristics are important requirements to allow human simulation tools to be deployed outside the domain of human factors specialists. The tools used to evaluate the human performance capability are sensitive to posture information, so accurate and representative posturing is important to obtaining valuable design guidance from these tools.
Contemporary prediction tools attempt to model the whole body posture based on underlying optimization objectives or empirical models applied to the whole body. Some current reach and lift posturing applications involve the use of inverse kinematics (IK) to solve for the posture of legs, torso and arms. Hand glyphs are placed in the scene to define where the figure is to reach to, and an IK solver is used to posture the figure such that the hands reach these desired locations. While the IK solution is very general and quick, it often results in non-desirable postures.